Rewind 4 years, and you might recall Adidas and Nike as the top Marketing contenders for World Cup gear, with Adidas as an official sponsor, and Nike as their ambush Marketing competitor. Both brands were extremely successful with their campaigns, partly because the 2010 World Cup events showed the highest numbers for a sporting event ever on social, providing a great way to increase engagement amongst soccer fans.

Fast forward to 2014, and not a lot has changed in the battle of the boots and jerseys. Adidas has again claimed a spot as an official sponsor, with Nike looming in the background ready to pounce. In fact, Nike wasted no time, and was the first brand to launch a World Cup spot this year with the inspirational theme ‘Risk Everything’.

And Adidas should take note of Nike’s presence, especially since Nike brought the pressure last year when Adidas sales slumped in Western Europe. Truth be told, it’s anyone’s game when it comes to which brand will come out on top after this year’s World Cup.

Segmentation- From Planning to Launching

Elaborating on last week’s post, we plan to reveal some Marketing tactics that might help each of these brands (and smaller brands) gain the World Cup Marketing advantage, by moving away from the campaign ‘Planning’ phase and into the ‘Active’ phase.

To start, let’s look at the changes in the @FIFAWorldCup Personas. Last week, the most engaged Persona was ‘Wholesome Males’. Another sample of tweets this week reveals that ‘Reliable Males’ are now just as engaged as ‘Wholesome Males’.

‘Reliable’ and ‘Wholesome’ Males lead the pack for @FIFAWorldCup engagement.

So how can brands use this information? Let’s start with Adidas. They’ve hit social hard for their last few soccer-themed campaigns, introducing several hashtags (including #FastOrFail for their AdiZero f50 boot, and #GetReady for their Body Care line). A very smart move on their part.

Now it might also be smart for them to use real-time segmentation to ‘boost’ any online campaigns running concurrently with their TV spots. This week, that means speaking to the ‘Wholesome’ and ‘Reliable’ Personas that are actively engaged with @FIFAWorldCup and soccer.

Campaign Content Shouldn’t Stay Static

Maybe that entails creating some fresh, new content (social, online advertising, etc) that these Personas can relate to better, because as mentioned last week, personality types unconsciously ‘Respond To’ or ‘Get Turned Off’ by certain language. The newly engaged ‘Reliable Male’ Persona break-down is below:

‘Reliable’ people respond to challenge and action, and are turned off by fluff.

Popular Hashtags Lead Back to You

Another way to boost their campaigns might be to use the favorite hashtags from both Personas, to encourage engagement with the Adidas campaigns. The current ‘Reliable Male’ favorite hashtag list is below (and what do you know, #Adidas made the cut). Using these hashtags in addition to the unique campaign hashtags might bring in more eyeballs from the online soccer audience who Adidas is looking to sell to.

Use your audience’s favorite hashtags to get more eyeballs on your content.

Next week we’ll look at the @FIFAWorldCup top shared media and interests, and discuss how Marketers can use that data to make unique media placement and brand influencer decisions.

It’s time once again for another installment of ‘Your Feedback Mattrs’. This is where we go over recent changes and keep you informed of what’s in the development queue. We rely heavily on your feedback to prioritize what is important. We all love hearing how you’re using or would like to use Mattr so please, please, please keep the feedback coming.

Here are some of the recent changes to Mattr:

Persona ‘View More’ Page

All of the changes we’re covering today are from the ‘View More’ page of your personas. Discover the demographics, interests and personality traits of your social media followers that you can apply to creative planning and production.

Natural Language Persona Description

When you click to view more about one of your personas you’ll see a natural language breakdown in the top left of the screen. You can click to Learn More About Personality Segments to know what content and stories you should develop to increase engagement.

Just below the description you’ll be able to quickly see the breakdown of any personality or demographics that aren’t filters for your persona. All of this helps you discover more about your audience and what resonates with them.

Interests

You’ll also notice a natural language filter on the Interests section. You can now select the category of interests, All, Brand, Media, Music, Public Figure, Sport, or TV/Movie that are popular or unique. You can use this to find surprising influencers you should be targeting, determining which publications to pitch or use for media placement, or even for influencers that would make effective partners. Want to see more interests? Just click on the + to expand the total number of interests that are shown.

Favorite Tags

Find out the hashtags that are important to your personas. Gain additional insight into what topics are engaging your target audience. Just like the Interests, you can see more tags by clicking on the + in the top right.

Most Shared Media

Use the ‘Most Shared Media’ section to see which media outlets or social media channels are shared most by your engaged followers. You don’t need to go very far down the list to find interesting media that can help you determine media/content placement and potential pitching targets to reach the greatest number of people.

Expanded Help

We’ve added help to appear when you’re creating your Historical Snapshot, Active or Future Campaigns, and Personas. You can also view help for any screen by clicking the ? in the top right.

Here’s what we’re working on:

We’ve heard from several of you that you’d like to know who engaged with your campaign but don’t follow your brand. So, we’re adding the ability to see who follows you and who does not into personas. We’re also working on adding information about your personas to the initial Brand Campaign screen. What else would you like to add to the list?

I want to know what you think

Each week I look at the feedback we receive to prioritize where we should be making adjustments. Is there functionality you wish existed? Can we make changes to a process to make the experience better for you? Is there something that you don’t use or maybe don’t understand? Your feedback gives us answers to questions like these and helps us drive what additions or modifications we make each week. You are important to us. We listen to you, the Mattr user community, before making any changes.

Is there something you’d like us to be working on for you? Email me, kyle@mattr.co, I would love to hear from you.

The World Cup hype has officially started! And if you’re in Marketing/ Advertising, you’re probably keeping a close eye on the various campaigns that have been introduced to pay homage to one of the world’s most watched sporting events.

Some of the first to release their campaigns were the big soda brands. World Cup sponsor Coca-Cola and competitor Pepsi have both recently launched TV spots, and there’s already lots of chatter on who got it right. That answer might seem subjective to most. But as Marketers know, putting together a campaign that speaks to the right audience takes more than luck. It takes planning and strategy. It takes understanding of various brand segments and how to reach them on a personal level. And it takes knowing that powerful stories about the people behind a brand reside in unfiltered data.

That being said, it can be assumed that both Coca-Cola and Pepsi did lots of research for their campaigns, utilizing large budgets and plenty of time to plan (Coca-Cola apparently began planning back in 2012, and World Cup 2014 stands as their largest campaign ever!).

But for those agencies that might not have the dollars or time to spend on such intensive research- there are simple ways to accomplish a similar goal of understanding audiences by looking at some easily accessible data. We’ll show you how. And we’ll also come to our own conclusion, based on our own data, on which soda brand might have the slight advantage in the World Cup campaign wars.

Social- The Secret Sauce

Social has become a very viable option when it comes to gathering insights about your audience. It’s as easy as picking a social segmentation tool and diving in to all of the data.

We’ve started our own segmentation analysis with a historical snapshot of the FIFA audience, or the last 500 people who have engaged with @FIFAWorldCup on Twitter. That breakdown shows the highest engagement came from ‘Wholesome Males’, as seen below:

‘Wholesome Males’ are top engagers on Twitter for the @FIFAWorldCup audience.

‘Wholesome’ indicates personality traits like down-to-earth, honest, family oriented, sincere, real and sentimental. A ‘Wholesome’ person might respond best to campaigns based on truth, openness and emotion (more about ‘Personality Identification’ through social can be found here– very interesting stuff!).

Hot on the trails of those ‘Wholesome’ males are ‘Rugged’ males, with their own set of unique traits that gets them excited. It’s advantageous for Marketers to look into both groups to see what makes each of them tick.

Hash Out the Hashtags

Now take the analysis a step further, and look at the ‘real-time’ breakdown of the FIFA audience. In addition to those folks who are currently engaging with the @FIFAWorldCup Twitter handle, you might also be interested in the people who are using the top three most popular Twitter hashtags for the World Cup in general (which are #WorldCup, #Brazil, and #WorldCup2014). The new analysis looks like this:

A ‘real-time’ breakdown of the soccer audience also shows ‘Wholesome’ engagement.

Not surprisingly, the @FIFAWorldCup audience and those using the most popular World Cup hashtags look very similar. Looking ahead, a Marketer can be confident that the ‘Wholesome’ and ‘Rugged’ males should be the right audience to go after for a campaign.

Your Own Hashtags- Who’s Engaging?

Last, if you’ve created and launched campaign hashtags, it might be beneficial to analyze the people who are chiming in with those hashtags on social, as long as there’s some good traction. Today, both Coke and Pepsi have launched hashtags for their World Cup campaigns (#WorldsCup and #LiveForNow, respectively). Traction was highest during the release of the campaigns, and has now subsided.

However, as engagement with these hashtags increases again, which should be a top goal for both brands, Marketers can analyze what types of people the online campaigns are attracting and figure out ways to target those audiences better. We’ve started a new analysis on Coke’s hashtag engagement moving forward, and will report back in an upcoming blog.

So what does all of this tell you about launching your own World Cup (or any other) campaign? The point is that social data matters, and so do the people behind that data. If you can dig into that data enough to understand your audience on a very deep and personal level, then you’ve automatically pushed ahead of your competition when it comes to planning the tone and messages within your various campaigns.

Who Wins the Soda War?

The Coca-Cola campaign plays to inclusiveness, youth, uniqueness, togetherness, grandiosity and social good (think ‘Wholesome’). The Pepsi campaign plays towards celebrity, playfulness, music, creativity, art and fun (think ‘Sophisticated’ or ‘Daring’). According to our analysis of the FIFA audience, our vote goes to Coke. But hats off to both campaigns!

Next week we’ll take a look at changes to the @FIFAWorldCup Personas as engagement increases, which might cause Marketers to tweak their real-time campaigns. And we’ll compare two new ‘Big Brand’ campaigns that have staked their claim on the World Cup turf.

As a digital marketer, you work in a world of instant gratification and insatiable curiosity. Your target market is used to engaging with an extraordinary amount of information at home, at work, and on mobile devices through social media. The hashtag is the unifying element that will take your marketing campaign to the next level.

The mechanics of a hashtag, particularly popular on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook, allow any user to curate her social stream with just one click. No complicated searching and following particular people or causes. Just click, point, and be entertained.

Want to read or watch what’s interesting to you? Click a hashtag.

Want to find people who have had experiences similar to yours? Click a hashtag.

If you represent a brand or business looking to capitalize on the benefits of the hashtag culture, you need to build and promote a “forever” or “evergreen” hashtag. It’s the online cornerstone of your culture, and you can’t afford to ignore it.

Tapping Into Organic Interests

During a recent Mattr campaign, hashtag traffic accounted for nearly eight times the engagement of our branded social media efforts. The most surprising part of that insight was that the engagement we received came from users who didn’t even follow the brand; they were following other people or brands that used the attractive campaign hashtag and engaged with the campaign organically.

What matters here are organic user interests. It’s far simpler for users to click on a hashtag to instantly see what’s happening within that topic than to search all the people and brands that might be posting about it. Just take the #Oscars celebrity selfies. Users wanted to see what was happening in their area of interest right then and engage with millions of other users on the topic, not follow particular celebrities or users to see what they’re up to.

Creating a Memorable Hashtag

Perhaps the best example of an effective evergreen hashtag is Nike’s #JustDoIt. The slogan has a long history as Nike’s inspirational tagline, and it excites you to action. It’s your constant reminder that, with Nike, you can do it, whether it’s running three miles for the first time or running a marathon.

While it may seem simple from the outside, an evergreen hashtag has a lot going on inside. It’s like a stimulant that releases new and wonderful feelings your users weren’t sure they had. But to get that effect, it needs to be as well-thought-out and researched as when you picked your brand or company name. Here are four guidelines for building the most memorable “forever” hashtag:

1. Start with your brand truths.

Your brand truths are those guiding statements that you look back on during difficult product or strategy decisions. The guts of the evergreen tag should be deeply nested in the three or four core tenets of your brand. From there, lift a phrase that encompasses one or more of them that can apply to other aspects of life in a positive way.

2. Seek something universal.

The best hashtags are ones that users can apply to posts that have nothing to do with your brand. That’s what makes them so shareable and so popular. Choosing a hashtag with a universal positive application is a critical characteristic of an evergreen hashtag.

3. Consider the present and the future.

When brainstorming your brand’s evergreen hashtag, make sure you think about how the hashtag is being used in the present and how it could be used in the future. Is it way out of your brand’s personality? Has it been used for crass or insipid trends? See if your target audience is using it now or if they might be turned off by it in the future. Make sure it’s not being used for some weighty cause that, upon insertion of your brand, would be horrifyingly inappropriate.

4. Make it readable.

Short, readable headlines run the online world. Your hashtag needs to be easy to type, and it must take up as few precious characters as possible. When implementing your hashtag, “camel case” the words so the hashtag is easy to understand at a glance. (Think “#TheNextBigThing” versus “#thenextbigthing.”)

You also need to take into account how the letters look as a whole in popular social network fonts. For example, “#JustDoIt” could read an awful lot like “Just Dolt,” couldn’t it? When you’re forced to use a tagline with words that just don’t look good mashed together, use an underscore. Although they’re not easy to type, they’re becoming more and more popular as hashtags evolve.

Evergreen hashtags provide valuable opportunities for your target market to engage with your brand. And what’s more, an organically interested user will promote your brand in a natural way that spreads much further than a sponsored update or advertisement. Put the time and effort into developing a readable, shareable evergreen hashtag to find out how many users — beyond your followers — can find themselves in your brand’s story.